The Department of World Languages & Literatures (WLL), formerly the Department of Modern Language & Comparative Literature (MLCL), comprises 38 full-time faculty members who teach a total of ten languages and literatures from East and South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. While this makes for an exciting range of courses and scholarship, it also makes finding a name that fits the department challenging.
CAS News spoke with J. Keith Vincent, WLL Chair, about the department’s name change and how it better represents the work of the faculty and students within it.
Why and how did the name change from MLCL to WLL come about?
As a faculty, we have a strong history of collaborating across the wide range of languages and literatures we teach, [but] we have found that our students tend to identify strongly with the individual languages and national literatures they study. Many of our programs are small and provide rare opportunities for students to work extremely closely with faculty, which promotes this kind of strong identification. It has been more of a challenge to get our students to think of themselves as being part of a larger department. We had our first senior exit interviews in the spring of 2015 and were surprised to find that most of our German, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and Comparative Literature majors had not met each other until the moment we brought them together for the meeting.
In retrospect, this seemed like a wasted opportunity, and so we are trying to find new ways to encourage students to take better advantage of being a part of a [collaborative] department with so much to offer. Finding a new name for the department…[that] articulates an “identity that accurately reflects the dynamic and innovative collaborations that exist in the department” was a crucial first step.
So we held a day-long retreat in the fall of 2015 with all full-time faculty, including professors and lecturers at all ranks, at which we came to a consensus on the name “World Languages & Literatures.” We agreed that this name better communicates the range and diversity of languages and literatures that the department offers.
How does the name WLL more accurately represent the department than the former name, MLCL?
First and most simply, the name “Modern Languages” no longer fits the department. In the past few years we have added pre-modern languages to our palette, offering courses in classical Chinese and Japanese. Starting next year we will begin instruction in classical Persian and Sanskrit.
In other universities, most of the languages that we teach tend to be housed in area studies programs; in WLL, our wide range of languages is given coherence by a common focus on literary and humanistic studies. There really is no other department in the country that can boast of such a configuration.
We agreed that “languages” should precede “literatures” in our name to show our commitment to language study as the foundation of any serious effort to engage with other cultures. We see an unbroken continuum between the elementary language class in which students struggle to understand verb conjugations and the upper-level literature class in which they practice close and complex readings of literary texts.
Many of our faculty are trained in Comparative Literature, and identify as comparatists. This won’t change. But we believe that “World Literatures” better conveys the nature of what we do, especially as a department that focuses on undergraduate education. For us, the term “World” signals two things. To begin, it declares our connection to the emerging academic field of World Literature, an approach to literary studies that emphasizes the interconnectedness of different literary traditions, the way texts travel across the globe, and the crucial importance of translation in this process. The term also gestures towards literature as a place for creating and sustaining imaginary, utopian and, sometimes, real new worlds: that is, for changing the world.
What does this mean for the department as a whole?
There is no obvious connection in terms of region or language family among the ten languages and literatures taught in WLL…The ongoing challenge of articulating what it is that brings us together has become a stimulating collective intellectual endeavor. Whereas established US programs in comparative literature have lately been struggling to outgrow their traditionally Eurocentric outlook, the new scholarship and pedagogy in world literature embraces, and has been embraced by, a vastly larger part of the world.
It is also worth noting that some of the most exciting scholarship being done in the field today focuses on pre-modern literary cultures developed in multilingual and transregional contexts. Among the most distinguished current examples of work in pre-modern world literature is that of our own Sunil Sharma on Persianate cultures and of Wiebke Denecke on the literary Sinosphere.
This fall we will introduce a new gateway course that will serve all of our majors. “XL100: Explorations in World Literature: Leaving Home” will be co-taught by Yuri Corrigan (Russian literature) and Margaret Litvin (Arabic Literature), with guest lectures by WLL faculty working in many other languages and literatures. The idea is to introduce students to the full range of what the department has to offer. We’ll also be encouraging WLL faculty to sit in on the lectures. It should be a great opportunity to expand our own horizons and forge stronger connections across the department.
To participate actively in this new field requires a willingness to go back to the classroom and step outside of our comfort zones. The sheer scope and vastness of the study of world literature means that it is best served by a more collaborative approach than literary scholars have been accustomed to in the past. ◼︎
To celebrate their new name, WLL will host two inaugural symposia in the 2016-17 academic year. The first, to be held in October 2016, will feature presentations of current academic work by WLL faculty on literary subjects. The second, to be held in March 2017, will feature presentations of teaching methods centered on literary or filmic texts.